


Bright Young Things Alternate Ending - Lit Crit and Tragedy About Hubris Edition: First Draft

by InfiniteThunderRed



Category: Bright Young Things
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-02
Updated: 2019-12-02
Packaged: 2021-03-03 14:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21649081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InfiniteThunderRed/pseuds/InfiniteThunderRed
Summary: I went full English nerd on the ending of Bright Young Things. This is the result.
Kudos: 10





	Bright Young Things Alternate Ending - Lit Crit and Tragedy About Hubris Edition: First Draft

**Author's Note:**

> All through that last scene - right up until the moment the credits rolled - I kept thinking “Okaaaaay, and now they’re going to kick over a candle and burn down the house! … Oh-oh, no, okay, aaaaand now!”  
They didn’t though, and that left me very confused and narratively unsatisfied.  
See, I love a good tragedy about hubris, me, and this was shaping up to be a good one: all those bright young things, so fragile, yet tricked by a whirlwind culture into believing themselves invincible, soaring towards the sun while voices whispered in their ears that melted wax is the latest trend.  
And then pennies started to drop: a suicied, then a madhouse, a hurried, tearful goodbye. Nina left Adam. Then Adam left her right back. Then the war - he, drafted; she, married to a man she didn’t love. And then… 
> 
> In The Great Gatsby, the cause of the tragedy is that Gatsby decided when he was young the exact situation - the only situation - in which he would have succeeded. When Daisy loved him, and only him, and had never loved anyone else: when she was his he would finally be happy (this is called objectification, by the way, and it’s bad even if you’re not in a tragedy about hubris). He decided that was the one thing that could possibly make his life worthwhile. Even when she married another man, even when she had a baby, he clung to “fixing everything back up just the way it was,” believing that if he just had enough money, through enough parties, that he could restore the glorious past.  
That was his tragedy. And it was Adam’s too.  
But Adam got what he wanted. He got a happy(?) ending. The other man was easily dealt with, the girl took him back, heck - the child was even biologically his anyway.  
That wasn’t a satisfying ending. For one the story had been building to certain ending - a couplet at the end of a Shakespearian sonnet, and then we got an Emily Dickinson slant rhyme followed by a dash. What? Where did that come from?  
As the pennies drop all around them, two remain in the air, impervious the laws of physics.  
And what for? A happy ending? I don’t think it was even all that happy. Sure they were in love once, but a lot had happened since then. Each knew the other had betrayed them for money. They had spent years apart. She had built a life - not one she enjoyed, but a life nonetheless. She raised a child with another man.  
Then he waltzed into her house, announced that her husband was gone and henceforth he would be replacing him, and she accepted it with no explanation.  
Adam wasn’t the only one objectifying Nina - the narrative was in on it too.  
Art is in the business of expressing truths, but the ending of Bright Young Things doesn’t express a truth in my view, it expresses the fantasy of those who romanticize what could have been instead of accepting the new possibilities before them.
> 
> (Also in my version the whole drunken major side plot didn't happen because it made no sense whatsoever)

The war is announced on the wireless. Everyone turns to face Adam.  
  
Fade out, and into shots of the bright young things:  
Aggie, wasting away in the madhouse;  
Miles, on the run from the Gestapo in occupied France;  
Adam, dying in the trenches.  
  
Nina is forty five. She’s dying of cancer in a quiet hospital bed, her adult son holding her hand.  
She recounts to him the loss of her friends. Her survivor’s guilt. Her joyless marriage. All the bitter-sweet memories. All the things she wishes she could have changed. All the things she hopes he won’t have to suffer through.  
A pause.  
  
Her son reaches out, slowly closing her now lifeless eyes.  
A pause.  
  
Cut to Ginger, where he’s been leaning on the wall smoking this whole time, just out of frame.  
A pause.  
  
Ginger says something dickish yet philosophical that ends with the phrase bright young things.  
A pause.

Roll credits.

**Author's Note:**

> (Sorry the notes were so much longer than the actual story)


End file.
